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The rise and fall of the American Empire

Columnist Justin Raimondo writes for Antiwar.com about the escalation of US imperialism over the last several Federal presidents. Raimondo, as a Californian, looks to “restore” the lost Republic – a Republic that was killed a very long time ago and is well beyond the possibility of restoration. And his concern in this piece is foreign policy, not the cultural survival of distinct nations of people here at home. Despite this, he does make many excellent points about what has become of the Empire in recent years.

As the Fourth of July approaches, with all the Federal flag waving and jubilant celebrations of “our great nation” that will inevitably bring, it’s important to keep things in perspective. The US may still be the most powerful regime in all of history, but it’s also a dying, immoral Empire that is committing murder-suicide before our very eyes. It’s road to imperialism didn’t start under Clinton or Bush – the Empire cut its teeth on us. I’ve heard a lot of sentimentalism about the decline of the US of late. Weep not for it! It didn’t weep for us when it was killing our people and burning our cities to the ground. Southern nationalists have no use for “restoring” the US. On the contrary, in its death is our hope for survival.

If we look at American foreign policy under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, what strikes the non-partisan observer is a sense of continuity – and an escalating aggressiveness.

In Iraq, and now in Afghanistan, the US is announcing a “drawdown” – indeed, as far as the former is concerned, we are supposed to be withdrawing entirely. At least that’s what the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, signed by President Bush, stipulates. However, the Americans are trying to get around that by claiming – as newly confirmed Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in Senate hearings recently – there are still 1,000 al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq. The country “continues to be a fragile situation,” he averred, “and I believe that we should take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that we protect whatever progress we have made there.” Asked about the Iraqi government’s willingness to let the Americans stay, he testified:

“It’s clear to me that Iraq is considering the possibility of making a request for some kind of [troop] presence to remain there,” he said, adding that he had “every confidence that a request like that will be forthcoming.”

Ever since the Obama administration took office, US officials have been pressuringour Iraqi sock-puppets to cave in to US demands for an extended stay, in defiance of the “radical” Shi’ite leader, Muqtada Sadr, and his followers, who have joined the ruling coalition government. The fiercely nationalistic Sadrists are threatening to withdraw from the coalition, and even take up arms, if the deadline for the US withdrawal passes and the Americans are still there. This would serve the administration’s purposes rather neatly, providing a rationale for an extension of the deadline and marginalizing a troublesome figure who stands in the way of our long range plans.

And what, exactly, are those plans?

It’s clear that what the US envisions in Iraq is an “independent” state entirely dependent on US aid and military assistance: in short, an American protectorate, garrisoned with a “residual force” of several tens of thousands of “non-combat troops.”

The same holds true for Afghanistan, although the process is not as far along. That’s the purpose of announcing this fake “drawdown.” Look at the Afghan pattern: it’s virtually the same as in Iraq – a “surge,” followed by a “drawdown” to previous levels, with the end result being a garrison of US soldiers left behind to police its newly-integrated province. As Bob Woodward related in Obama’s Wars, then defense secretary Robert Gates – at a dinner for Afghan “President” Hamid Karzai – expressed his regret for going along with George H. W. Bush’s decision to “abandon” Afghanistan, and went on to declare:

Make no mistake: both Iraq and Afghanistan are provinces in an American empire that has rapidly expanded, since the fall of the Soviet Union, to include much of the Middle East – and, now, parts of North Africa, where the Libyan intervention is the tip of the American spear.

In Libya, to be sure, we are going in with our NATO allies, but this is just a stylistic difference with the previous administration: Bush and the neocons preferred to go it alone, while the present gang flies the flag of “multilateralism.” The result, however, is the same: a conquered province in an ever-expanding global empire, totally dependenton Western aid and support to keep afloat.

Back in the cold war era, the US constructed what the late Chalmers Johnson called “an empire of bases,” a series of lily-pads that allowed Washington to project American military power to the four corners of the earth at a moment’s notice. With the implosion of communism, and the end of the US-Soviet global confrontation, the Americans moved rapidly to put flesh on the bare bones of their empire.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, we are making the transition to a more traditional form of imperialism, following the Roman model: setting up protectorates which are allowed to run their own affairs internally – as long as they don’t conflict with US objectives, and permit a contingent of US troops to stand guard over the frontiers of empire.

Those frontiers are being pushed ever onward, and this is clearly the goal of the Obama administration in Pakistan – the next American target – as well as Libya. Yet this is also, for Washington’s empire-builders, an era of consolidation, when the military conquests of the previous administration are to be formalized and “legalized.”

At home, too, the empire is being institutionalized, and given a formal structure, as the President defends his supremacy in the foreign policy and military realm – so far successfully. Although the Founders abhorred imperialism, and are no doubt turning in their graves over the ongoing usurpation of Congress’s authority to make war, the White House has blithely gone about its business, ignoring its congressional critics – and this has been the case since the days of Harry Truman, who sent US troops to Korea without consulting the elected representatives of the people.

A few years ago there was a discussionamong foreign policy wonks about whether America should ditch its anti-imperialist heritage entirely and become an empire. I had to laugh at this “debate,” for America has been an empire in fact if not in formsince the end of World War II, and is now reaching the pinnacle of its power. Which is to say: it’s downhill all the way from this point.

The American empire may be expanding, but the economic foundations on which it rests are in fatal disrepair. As we contemplate our imminent bankruptcy – moral as well as financial – even as the present administration consolidates the “gains” of empire, I am reminded of one of Robinson Jeffers’s best poems:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

That Jeffers was a pessimist may be a considerable understatement. A major poet during the 1920s, when World War II came ‘round he dissented from the left-liberal enthusiasm for the Great Anti-Fascist Crusade – and went very quickly out of fashion. His vision of empire-building as a natural process of “splendor” and inevitable decay is alluring, because it explains a lot – including our own seeming powerlessness as the process unfolds.

Yet I don’t buy it – not the pessimism, but the “naturalism” of this Spenglerian concept of the American nation-state as a living breathing organism, ruled by the same youth-maturity-senility progression that defines the lives of individuals. States have no separate existence from the human beings that spawned them, and these individuals have free will. The pattern of imperial consolidation – “humanitarian” wars of “liberation,” followed by occupation and the installation of American garrisons in the newly-integrated provinces – is not the inevitable the result of some natural law in the evolution of great nation-states.

We are not mere peaches ripening on a tree, and falling to the ground to rot and “make earth”: we have, at least, the power to determine the circumstances of our ripening. “Shine, perishing republic,” mourned the dark prophet of American decline – but our republic won’t perish as long as there are those willing to fight for it.

This entry was posted on June 27, 2011 at 10:21 am and is filed under News & Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

GeorgiaRebel1980

“…and is now reaching the pinnacle of its power. Which is to say: it’s downhill all the way from this point.”

This makes me smile. I just hope it doesn’t take longer than 15-20 years. I hope that it crumbles enough in about 10-12 years so that the Southron people will finally be disillusioned enough for Southern Nationalist leaders to make serious ground on convincing the people to Secede, reject the empire’s culture of death, and embrace a Renaissance of traditional Southern culture. I can’t help but hope that in doing so also causes all the transplants, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and the undocumented to scatter out of Dixie like bugs in the kitchen when the light is turned on.

http://coloradoconfederatarian.squarespace.com/ Snaggle-Tooth Jones

Michael, great minds must think alike and scour the same online resources, for I just posted a blog entry about the Raimondo piece and then came over here to find that you’ve done the same.

GeorgiaRebel, I too liked that line from the Raimondo piece, but sadly, I think it may be take more than a decade or two for the Empire to fall. Could be another 50 – 100 years. We should work assiduously to ensure that it happens sooner than later, but I think we also need to be giving serious thought to how we can prepare our progeny — and theirs. The power of the pen being manifested in the new media, particularly the old right and alt right stuff, is a good start. But we ought to be forming an actual Rebel counterculture here and in order to inculcate our young ones into it. That means, among other things, home schooling, home businesses, and killing the television. We must emulate the Amish to the degree we are able (while of course maintaining our own particular non-Amish theologies). In short, we must disengage from this culture, form an alternative one, and raise our kids to be cultural beings of the latter.

Jared

The US empire will not survive the collapse of the dollar, at least in its current scope. The collapse of the dollar will result in the secession of some states from the empire, and there’s no way the dollar can survive another 50 years. I think there would still be a USA, just like there’s still a Russia today after the USSR de-centralized, but some starts or portions of states will break away.

Dutchy

Jared, as usual, you have it correct; it hinges on the viability of the dollar and the fate of that dollar is no longer under domestic control, but under that of its antagonists. The dollar is the Roman eagle standard of this Empire and it will crash. Jones, etal, happily, we won’t have to wait 20 years. Another 4 years of BO will surely do it. Even if he is not re-elected and by some miracle Ron Paul is, the Empire is STILL doomed because there is not the critical mass of resistance to its ways among the bread and circus types who mainly people it. It has reached the final stage of democracy, the stage in which the majority of people can demand and receive largesse at the expense of a still productive minority.

But know this – what will result will be a Pyrrhic victory for the South. Still, to be free of the Yankee nation will be worth even some 3rd degree burns… We KNOW we can recover because we have something to which we shall return. As Jeff Davis so prophetically said, (I paraphrase) the issue is still in play.

Misplaced Southerner

“Pride [goeth] before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18 (KJV)

johnny reb

Dear Sirs; What we need to do before we sow the total destruction of the republic of the, United States of America; is too get in touch with our past and fix our own problems, before we worry about the rest of the world, or we will fall as a awful divided nation.